Kathy McDaniel's distressing near-death experience raises an intriguing question: how much of what people experience during an NDE is shaped by the beliefs, expectations, fears, and experiences they bring into it?
Near-death experiences are usually associated with remarkably similar images.
Floating outside the body.
A bright light.
Deceased relatives.
An overwhelming feeling of peace and love.
A reluctance to come back.
That's not how Kathy McDaniel's experience began.
Kathy had been seriously ill with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and was placed in a medically induced coma for nearly three weeks. She remembers darkness, frightening environments, demons, destruction, and what she interpreted at the time as hell.
Eventually, the experience changed completely. She describes finding herself surrounded by an extraordinary feeling of love and joy and encountering a close friend who had recently died.
Then she woke up.
What interests me isn't whether Kathy's experience proves that heaven or hell exists.
It is something she said while we were discussing why her experience may have been so different from the peaceful NDEs we normally hear about - Kathy believes she created her own hell.
That raises a question:
Do we experience what we expect to experience?
A Near-Death Experience That Started in Darkness
Kathy corrected me almost immediately. I introduced her as having been clinically dead. She wasn't. She had been placed in a medically induced coma, while doctors treated her ARDS.
That raises a problem with the term near-death experience. Experiences placed under that label occur under different physiological circumstances. Kathy's experience occurred during a coma.
Her Experience
After being placed in the coma, she says everything went black.
Then she became aware again.
At first, she was in complete darkness, without knowing where she was.
Eventually she saw a reddish glow and fog, felt heat, smelled something unpleasant, heard people screaming and heard a voice ask, "Do you know where you are?"
The answer that came to her was, Hell.
What followed was a sequence of frightening experiences. She would find herself in darkness, then suddenly enter another environment. She remembers a destroyed city, fires, screaming people, strange machines and threatening beings. She didn't initially realize she was having a near-death experience. From her perspective, she was still Kathy.
Whatever explanation we give for an NDE—neurological, psychological, spiritual or something not yet considered—the person experiencing it may not experience it as a detached observer watching a hallucination.
To Kathy, it was happening.
Not Every Near-Death Experience Is Pleasant
We hear more about peaceful NDEs, than frightening ones. Kathy told me people who have distressing experiences frequently don't talk about them. The reason is understandable. Imagine telling someone that you nearly died and experienced a beautiful light. Try telling them you went to hell. The obvious response might be:
"Why did you go to hell?"
Kathy spent ten years unable to talk openly about what happened. She felt ashamed, embarrassed and confused. Later she began meeting others who had experienced what's labeled, "distressing NDEs."
That creates an interesting selection problem: Is our perception of what an NDE is, influenced by which types of experiences people are willing to report?
If peaceful experiences are easier to discuss than frightening ones, the stories we hear may not represent the complete range of experiences. We need to be careful about drawing conclusions based on stories that are the most popular and pleasant.
Why Did Kathy Experience Hell?
Kathy grew up Catholic. Not casually Catholic. She described Catholic schools, Mass, rosaries, novenas, and a deeply internalized belief system involving sin, judgment, purgatory and hell.
Years after her NDE, she began recognizing elements of her frightening experience. One of the destroyed environments reminded her of the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which she had personally experienced.
She began wondering whether the frightening world she experienced hadn't been a place she was sent to at all. Perhaps it was assembled from things already inside her. Her conclusion became: "I made my own hell."
Kathy takes the idea farther. She believes expectations and deeply held beliefs can shape what someone experiences during an NDE.It's a fascinating hypothesis, as it produces questions we could investigate, rather than simply asking whether someone's story is true.
Do people from different religions have different NDEs?
Do people who believe in hell, report distressing experiences more frequently?
Do people encounter religious figures consistent with their existing beliefs?
Do childhood experiences appear in NDE imagery?
Do people without religious beliefs have different experiences?
Most interesting: What happens when someone experiences something that contradicts what they believed before the NDE?
The Catholic Question
During our conversation, Kathy made a striking claim. She said that approximately 85% of the people with distressing NDEs she had encountered were Catholic.
I'm still thinking about that. Kathy's observation is not conclusive evidence that 85% of all distressing NDEs occur among Catholics. It's possible geography, demographics, referral patterns, willingness to disclose an experience, and other variables could influence who she encounters. Her experience with people who seek out a particular support community isn't a randomly selected population.
Her observation generates a testable question: If religious expectations do influence NDEs, we might expect some relationship between a person's beliefs before an experience, and what the person reports as their NDE experience.
If such a relationship exists, there are two possible interpretations. One is psychological:
Existing beliefs construct the experience.
Another is spiritual:
What someone encounters is presented through concepts the person is capable of understanding.
Those aren't the same, and observations alone wouldn't tell us which is correct.
Then Her Experience Changed
Kathy's experience didn't remain frightening. Near the end, she was singing a Christmas carol. When she reached a religious reference, one of the threatening beings reacted, and the experience changed. Suddenly, she became immersed in an extraordinary sensation of love and joy. She saw her friend, who had died shortly before her illness. He appeared healthy.
Kathy says she thought, "He doesn't know he's dead."
Then, she realized, perhaps she was dead.
Rather than frightening her, she thought, “This is wonderful news,” and she wanted to stay. According to Kathy, her friend communicated that she still had things left to do.
She regained consciousness in the hospital.
Seeing that, her daughter announced, "Mom's back."
What Changed Afterward?
The experience changed Kathy. She didn't became more religious. It was the opposite. She became less attached to organized religion, more focused on principles. She describes asking for something positive she could use in everyday life, rather than a collection of rules about what not to do. What emerged was a list:
Be loving.
Be kind.
Be merciful.
Be forgiving.
Be encouraging.
Be grateful.
Be nonjudgmental.
Be useful.
When that's too much to remember:
Just be loving and kind.
You don't have to accept Kathy's explanation of her NDE to experiment with her conclusion.
You can:
- Say hello to someone who looks lonely.
- Hold a door open.
- Smile.
- Be kind, when it would be easier to be irritated.
Experience Is Not Explanation
Near-death experiences present a reasoning problem. Someone such as Kathy can be sincere about what she experienced, without that establishing why she experienced it.
"What did Kathy experience?" and "What caused Kathy to experience it?" are separate questions.
Saying, "It only happened in her brain," doesn't explain the experience.
Saying, "She literally visited hell and heaven," goes beyond what her testimony can establish.
Kathy has an interpretation.
A neuroscientist might have another.
A psychologist might propose another.
A theologian may propose another.
If prior beliefs influence NDE content, that's interesting.
If they don't, that's interesting.
The Question Isn't "Are NDEs Real?"
Discussions about experiences like Kathy's go wrong when we immediately divide ourselves into camps: It's real, and It's hallucination. That's like asking what's your conclusion, before we define the problem.
Kathy experienced something such that she remembers it decades later and says it fundamentally changed how she thinks about death, religion, and people. That experience is real in the sense that she experienced it. What produced it is a different question.
Kathy's story gives us an especially interesting variable to investigate:
What did the person believe before the experience?
If expectations, culture, religion, previous experiences and fears influence what someone experiences during an NDE, understanding those relationships could tell us something about NDEs. It might tell us something about the brain or consciousness, and beliefs. It might lead somewhere we haven't considered.
Here's the simple question:
When someone has a near-death experience, how much of what they experience is shaped by the beliefs, expectations, fears, and experiences they brought into it?
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About the Author
Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw, and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.